P.J. O’Rourke Says Don’t Vote Republican

Prankster and humorist P..J. O’Rourke has fooled the Weekly Standard into printing a
savage takedown of the conservative movement
, masquerading as a takedown of liberalism. Democrats, O’Rourke writes, are nihilists with no interest in passing good legislation.

That’s the tell: O’Rourke is rallying the readers of the Weekly Standard on behalf of women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, the poor, and the middle class? Sure. And Jonathan Swift was
in favor of eating babies
.

No, O’Rourke’s message is that Democrats (“Democrats”) are obsessed with nothing but power. They don’t care how much damage they do to the country or even to themselves, as long as they can seize and use power. Resentment and jealousy are their only motives.

By the time O’Rourke declares that Democrats support gay marriage because it allows them to bring “domestic private life” under “domination,” the joke is clear. The writer is spoofing the voice of a movement so drunk on self-righteousness it’s slurring its words. He’s taken
Dinesh D’Souza’s embarrassing little stunt
of blaming every Obama administration policy on radical Kenyan anticolonialism and made it even dumber, blowing it out from self-parody into full-on parody: here is what happens if you take one simpleminded theory and apply it to anything, for cheap polemical effect, because all you care about is scoring points. You end up praising illegal immigrants as anti-Democratic Party insurgents who are evading the “legal monopoly on force.” In the Weekly Standard, yet.

It’s an elegant warning against the Republican obsession with winning at all costs. The party that marches back into command behind the banner of Christine O’Donnell and Sharon Angle, O’Rourke is warning his readers, is on a suicide mission. Anger and the will to power are corrupting—unexamined and unchecked, they turn politicians into tyrants, and they turn a humorist into a screeching blowhard.

[* Correction: As
chicoandtheman2001@yahoo.com
pointed out in the comments, the original headline used quotation marks, and it should not have.]